This refers more to Ms Krall's album from last year-
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/m ... 87,00.html
Rocky Mountain News
That Sinatra vibe
Doing an album of standards was still a labor of love for songstress Krall
By Mark Brown, Rocky Mountain News
August 27, 2007
After doing an album of originals and a Christmas disc, jazz singer/pianist Diana Krall wondered what to do next. She was inclined to shy away from standards because of the glut of singers jumping on that bandwagon.
But then she got the notion of singing Cole Porter's From This Moment On, and an album was born. Also born: the twin sons of Krall and her husband Elvis Costello, making it a different world.
She talked about music and family life recently with Rocky pop music writer Mark Brown.
What made you record these big-band songs rather than more originals?
Krall: "Because I worked with the Clayton Hamilton Jazz Orchestra, a big band, during the Christmas record. I really enjoyed it. I hadn't done it for a while. The intensity of writing and performing . . . was a lot of work. I was sort of wanting to take a different turn. I was pregnant while I was making a record. I just loved working with John and Jeff (Clayton). I'd never worked with a big band before. I wanted to reach out here to Frank Sinatra at the Sands, that whole Sands kind of vibe."
It seems like every singer out there has suddenly jumped on the American songbook. Does that worry you?
Krall: " It really puts me in a weird position. That's one of the reasons I did an about-face. It was just like 'Forget it. People are going to be sick of this.' But you can't really go there. This is music that's repertoire. That was an era when there were a lot of great singers. They were all covering the same songs, but differently and very well. I try not to go there and be self-conscious and think. I'm just doing what I want to do honestly, because I can't lie. I can't say, 'I'll do this one because it'll be more commercial.' I have to find the story in it. I've only done (a song) once in my whole career where I felt like it wasn't right for me."
How did you pull the final songs together?
Krall: "Sequencing is really always hard. You do an album of 12 tunes and then there's five bonus tracks that you've added on to whatever store wants to put their own exclusives. You're really making albums with about 20 tunes now because the market is the way it is. You go to iTunes and they're selling singles again. The whole thing has changed. People make their own play list and their own CDs. I'm still pretty old-school. I spend a lot of time sequencing and balancing. This isn't the difficult part. (In picking the songs) for me it's like falling in love. My life has changed so I'm ready now to sing a certain song where maybe I wouldn't be two years ago because I couldn't relate to it."
Do things like bonus tracks and ringtones make it difficult to resist pressure to be more commercial?
Krall:"I'm not very easily pushed. I dig in my heels pretty hard. I'm in control of everything that I do, and I make sure that everything that goes out, I better love it. I always find promotion the most difficult - the 'doing the press part.' I'm better now because I feel a little less defensive. When I first came out it was all about they just wanted to talk about my legs and the this and the that."
Oh, we'll get to the legs.
Krall: "Oh good, thank you. I want my old body back. I'm still postpartum."
You're more comfortable with the press now, but you're arguably better tabloid fodder now, too. Is the attention difficult?
Krall: "When I'm by myself, I don't really have any problem with that. If somebody took pictures of us on Mother's Day, I thought that's fine. But I don't want their lenses in my children's faces. Every parent would feel that way. They didn't choose it. I don't think we're real tabloid fodder. We're not there."
How do marriage and children impact your time for music?
Krall: "I'm always really full-on. I was just feeding my son when I called you. This is why I'm still carrying 15 pounds of weight (laughs). I'm not training hard. I'm being a mom to two children and trying to look after myself. I started to diet and got run down and got really sick. So if I'm going to be an artist and do the work I need to do and travel and be a good mother, I'm just not going to sleep. I'm just going to do everything. I just played two shows a night at Yoshi's over the weekend and I'm tired. I've always had tons of stamina. It's what I want to do. Having said all that, yes, it's an adjustment. They're really good boys and we're loving every moment of it. It's good for them to see what Mommy does."
What's it like going from a small-club date like Yoshi's to playing big outdoor venues?
Krall: "What's difficult is when I have to play in daylight, when you can see the whole audience. I find that more difficult. When it's nighttime, you can make it into an intimate setting. You can use your imagination more. The elements don't bother me."
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On a slightly related note , the death has sadly happened of U.K. music writer
Richard Cook -
http://www.rocksbackpages.com/article.h ... leID=11505
Rocks Back Pages have reprinted a 1984 review of the Sinatra re-issues that I was delighted to get after the Costello article featured here earlier on -
http://www.rocksbackpages.com/article.h ... icleID=197
Frank Sinatra: Songs For Young Lovers and other Capitol reissues
Richard Cook, NME, 22 September 1984
BECAUSE SINATRA has lasted so long, has outlived his own legend – to the point where he can make a record with Quincy Jones and apparently see nothing incongruous – the perspective of his greatest music has been distorted by his subsequent fallibility. The same thing happened to Armstrong, Crosby and Presley; but none were so willful about their decline as Sinatra.
His incomparable public boorishness has contributed to it – Gary Giddins has astutely described him as "half mensch and half punk, a virtuoso at storing wounds" – but so has the two-way tug which is the genius of his singing: a worldly socialite’s Sunday charm and the lingering, trembling vulnerability of the former matinee crooner. Nobody could persist like that into old age and stay aloof from ridicule.
Fortunately, of course, Sinatra’s records remain to outshine his vulgarly tarnished myth. EMI’s reissue of 18 digitally remastered Capitol Sinatras has been timed to coincide with his series of London concerts this week, and the voice which the faithful will hear in person will be a shadow of The Voice of those LPs: cut between 1953 and 1961, they are a chronicle of singing that must electrify anyone who only knows the revolting nostalgia of ‘My Way’.
When he moved to Capitol in 1952, Sinatra was facing a crisis: dumped by Columbia, the swing era he was reared in already gone, his career seemed in tatters. It was From Here To Eternity and the advent of the long-playing record that saved him. The first two collections, Songs For Young Lovers and Swing Easy, were light, amiable records with the singer still the big band vocalist in songs like ‘All Of Me’, still impersonally mannered in ‘Like Someone In Love’. But what came next was unprecedented, the first albums to turn the medium to the singer’s advantage.
In The Wee Small Hours took the daring step of running 16 slow ballads side by side, and the result was some of Sinatra’s most profound and involved work. The songs were uniformly superb, and in his flawless delivery – every phrase articulated with noble precision, every legato shift and taking of breath finely judged – Sinatra paid them the highest due. When the material was as fine as Lorenz Hart’s lyric for ‘It Never Entered My Mind’ – "Once you told me I was mistaken/That I’d awaken with the sun/and order orange juice for one/It never entered my mind" – Sinatra told the tale with deceptive simplicity; but when it was ‘When Your Love Has Gone’ a whiskery jazz novelty even in 1955, he made it the loneliest prayer for comfort.
Sinatra followed with Songs For Swingin’ Lovers, and his mastery was unchallenged. It might not be the best of his Capitols but it’s the best remembered. If the concept was already old-fashioned in 1956, with rock going through its birth squeals, the execution sounded so effortless, relaxed, intimate... and it blended perfectly the knowing fidelity of ‘Our Love Is Here To Stay’ and the Broadway exuberance of ‘Old Devil Moon’. As Sinatra turned 40, his voice and his confidence were at their most assured.
Those two records encapsulate the different styles which were deepened and amplified over the later records for Capitol. Both were arranged by Nelson Riddle, Sinatra’s most frequent principal and a man whose hackwork for other singers (most notoriously, Ella Fitzgerald) was mysteriously transcended by his writing for The Voice. For Close To You he set ballads to a string quartet, and Sinatra sang as gently as if the songs would break; for the aching Only The Lonely, a full orchestra played even more slowly than on In The Wee Small Hours.
But two other arrangers urged Sinatra into his most extreme work. With Billy May on Come Fly With Me, Come Dance With Me and Come Swing With Me Sinatra clung on to his big band roots: in these brash, brassy arrangements (although Fly has some ballads, including a gorgeous ‘Autumn In New York’) the high-stepping tempos are shouldered by a voice still in complete control. ‘Something’s Gotta Give’ and an impetuously fast ‘The Song Is You’ are irresistible pieces of barnstorming.
Arguably, though, it is the two records with Gordon Jenkins that cut deepest of all. Where Are You? programmes a dozen of the most desolate ballads in colours dominated by Jenkins’ huge waterfall of strings and a Sinatra who seem to be bowed in pain. Few records have summoned the emotive charge of ‘I’m A Fool To Want You’ or ‘Autumn Leaves’. Yet, incredibly, No One Cares surpasses it. It was subtitled ‘Ballads In A Lonely Mood’, but the treatment given a song like ‘Here’s That Rainy Day’ is something much darker than that. Even Sinatra’s detachment fails him when the record climaxes on the numbing ‘None But The Lonely Heart’.
What’s striking about hearing these records one after another, hearing a considerable chunk of the best popular songs ever written, is how the Capitol Sinatra always put the song first. He was the great interpretive singer because he offered so few embellishments, expecting a classic melody and lyric to sustain a singer’s energy; on the few occasions where he tried to perform like a jazz singer (‘I Concentrate On You’ from Swingin’ Session) the results were uncomfortable. Once Sinatra had decided how a song was to be, it stayed that way: comparing the versions of ‘Last Night When We Were Young’ from In The Wee Small Hours (1955) and September Of My Years (1965) shows the conception of the song remaining constant.
What changed was the material itself. As Sinatra grew older, his instinct for a good song declined to the point where he eventually succumbed to wooing the ‘60s pop audience. That decline is manifest in some of his last records for Capitol. But in the LPs indicated above (to which Nice ‘N’ Easy and A Swingin’ Affair can also be added), where Sinatra had songs that had a mystery to fathom and a detail to uncover, he was matchless.
What such records will mean to a contemporary audience depends on what that audience wants to listen to in its music. Sinatra’s records are rhythmically square, sung by a man who was even then entering early middle age; and there are preciously few ‘swingin’ lovers’ today. But if you find yourself moved by a singer’s voice, you will need to hear the best of Sinatra; and the best is on these records.
